Litter re-use: techniques to effectively destroy viral pathogens

The growth of the poultry industry in Australia has placed strains on the availability of litter materials, driving costs up. A survey of poultry companies in 2007 (Islam and Walkden-Brown, 2010) revealed that they spent $12-21 per m³ for new litter material, if it was available at all. Transportation of these bulky materials is also expensive. Runge (2007), using earlier lower input prices, estimated that the meat chicken industry spent $10.78 million annually on bedding material and received about $0.71 million in return for the used litter. This left a cost of $10.07 million annually for bedding material. They reported that about 1.17 million m³ of bedding material was used by the industry each year with approximately 1.60 million m³ of used chicken litter produced. Coufal et al. (2006) working in the USA reported production of between 1.2 and 1.5 tons of used litter per 1,000 broiler chickens, when reared on a single-batch litter. In the USA and increasingly in Australia, the disposal of spent litter is also under increasing regulatory control. Thus there are potential economic and environmental advantages if litter can be safely reused for chicken production.